Ghosts by Daylight

by Janine di Giovanni

  ‘And how many dead bodies have you seen?’

  The heightened danger and ubiquitous threat that journalists confront carries significant psychological challenges. Exposure to life-threatening events creates potential risk for conditions such as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), depression and substance abuse, and journalists are not immune. Data collected from a group of 218 front-line journalists who worked in zones of conflict for 15 years revealed, on average, rates of PTSD five times higher than those found in the general population. Moreover, rates of depression and alcohol abuse in this group well exceeded those found in journalists who had spent their careers far removed from the danger of distant conflicts.

  – Dr Anthony Feinstein,

  PTSD and War Correspondents

  So I survived, sort of. Bruno’s voyage out was much harder.

  I did not know how to heal my husband, and even if I had, he would not have let me.

  My mother always comforted her sick children with food. It was the best way she knew of showing the love that she had. She was never one to throw her arms around you and smother you with kisses, the way I do with my son, but she was a great one for making poached eggs on toast, or farina with sprinklings of sugar, or cinnamon toast when we were home from school ill.

  For this reason, I loved getting sick as a child, and perhaps psychosomatically, I was sick often, with colds, with flu, with bronchitis. I was thin and weak and pale, and my favourite moment was the morning when she would shove a thermometer under my tongue and find a fever. ‘OK,’ she would say briskly. ‘No school, get back into bed.’

  Then she would abandon whatever she had planned for her day – girlfriends, shopping, lunches. She would change the sheets, pile the bed with pillows, tell me to wash my face and teeth and fold me into the bed, pulling the sheets around me and tucking me in. Then she would bring tea with lemon and honey, orange juice and my medicine on a little dish with a spoon. It was the only time – except for in church – I remember as a child feeling that I had my mother’s full attention.

  She continued to pay more attention to us when we were ill even when we became adults. When my brother Richard was dying in her bed, and was always freezing cold, wrapped in layers of Patagonian fleeces and rag socks and blankets, unable to eat, and weighing about 80 pounds, she would try to feed him. She made milkshakes with extra eggs and a child’s pasta – pastina – with spoonfuls of sugar. She made chicken noodle soup or grilled cheese sandwiches, none of which he could eat.

  She could not address what was killing him – nor did she have solutions about what we could do. She did not know how to save him, but she could feed him. One day, she came back from his bedroom with an untouched chocolate milkshake, still frosted in the tall glass, and she was crying. ‘He’s fading away before my eyes,’ she said. I remembered, as she said that, her using those same words about my father as he lay dying in the same bed ten years before.

  And so, I brought Bruno food in the Paris hospital. I stopped at the open-air market near rue St Jacques and bought half a roast chicken, some yogurt from a Greek deli, some fruit, some small lemon tarts. I bought a bottle of Perrier and some chocolate because he loved chocolate. I bought some flowers and the newspapers and some magazines. I carried all my purchases in plastic bags on to the bus which ran up past the Luxembourg, and down around the old Austrian church, Val de Grace, built by Queen Anne of Austria in 1667 to thank Our Lady for the birth of a son, Louis XIV, after twenty-three years of marriage.

  The hospital nearby, with the same name, was not as lovely as the church. Inside it was sterile and smelled, like all hospitals no matter where in the world, of antiseptic and blood. The nurse directed me to the psychiatric unit and another nurse directed me to his room.

  And I saw my husband. He was lying on the bed. When had he gotten so thin? When he saw me, his eyes did not quite register his wife. I put the food on the table next to him, but he barely noticed it. He was drugged up on Thorazine or something so powerful that when I looked at him, it was not his eyes and it was not his mouth or his hands. He was someone different.

  He stood up to walk and a man came in, his roommate. He said hello and climbed into his bed, pulling the covers up. He was a former soldier who was, I suppose, suffering from trauma. He looked deranged. ‘Don’t talk to him,’ Bruno said. ‘He’s strange.’

  We walked a bit in the hallway and I met the psychiatrist. She was cold and efficient, pretty in a bland way, unemotional. I felt that she regarded me and my husband as another species. I stayed an hour, then Bruno began to fall asleep.

  He came home after that, within a few weeks, but he was never really the same again, nor was our household. It was not that something had broken, but the bubble of joy that contained little unit in which we existed had been split in half. The ghosts of the past were chasing us. And they had managed to catch him.

  On Toussaint, All Saints’ Day, 1 November, we went for a picnic in the woods outside of Paris. The baby wore a fluffy striped turtleneck I had bought one freezing cold day in New York while his godmother Connie, my friend since I was four years old, pushed his stroller. Bruno had good days and bad days, and this was a good day.

  He rented a car and drove us to a small auberge and we had lunch, roast chicken and frites, which I fed the baby, and then we hiked a bit, Luca on Bruno’s back. We loaded the rented car with firewood from the forest, and back at rue du 29 Juillet we built a fire. Bruno lay in front of it, feline and beautiful, and stared at the flames. But when I made dinner, he would not eat.

  If you were standing on our balcony, and you put your nose to the glass of the french doors, and looked in on the room inside warmed by a fire, and a mother holding an angelic-looking baby with golden curls and fat, fat cheeks, and a beautiful father, you would believe it was a perfect photograph.

  But nothing is as it seems. Near the fire that night, I felt something coming, something stronger than me, running as quickly as I felt the winter coming, some kind of strange and unwanted monster, or a beast, getting closer to us, and faster, but I could not do anything to stop it. It was the catastrophe I had feared.

  I listened to a song that night by a Canadian band called Stars. ‘When there is nothing left to burn, set yourself on fire.’

  Winter, and a Christmas tree bought at the Place de la Madeleine. We found it together and Bruno dragged it into a taxi and home. There were ornaments from Germany, small crystal hearts and red glass balls that I found on the rue de Richelieu, and snow from a tin that Bruno sprayed on the branches. The tree was beautiful. A friend arrived and took photos of us, black and white, the three of us, looking up at the angel on a tree. She shook her head. ‘You’re all so photogenic,’ she said.

  ‘Inside, I feel like ashes,’ my husband said. At night, Bruno did not sleep. He either stayed awake at his computer playing a war game called ‘Age of Empires’ – ‘Why is it that I only like films that are either completely violent or for children?’ he asked me one night – or sat on the sofa smoking and watching television.

  What was he doing in those hours between dusk and dawn? I am embarrassed that I do not know, or perhaps the truth is I did not want to know, because I would find bottles the next day by the aluminium trash bin. ‘Did we finish two bottles of wine last night?’

  ‘I had a couple of glasses.’

  He never had hangovers, but when I woke up early to see the baby or begin to work, he would stay asleep. Sometimes he slept until noon; sometimes he fell asleep on the sofa at suppertime and woke up around the time I was going to bed. He never seemed to eat. If I made him something, he would look at it reluctantly, taking bites. He did not want to go out. He did not want to see people.

  But still, weak and ill, he wanted to protect us as Luca grew. When we’d been in Paris for nearly three years, we moved across the river, and he built us a house. This too was a beautiful place, an old flat by the Luxembourg Gardens; an elderly woman who had passed away left it to her children, and they sold it to us. �
�Hemingway lived on this street,’ Bruno told me. ‘You were meant to be here.’

  But the flat was ancient, it did not have modern heating, or electricity, and it needed endless work, travaux, the same word in French used for giving birth, labour. Bruno found Polish builders and they pounded the walls to dust, opening up schisms of light. He uncovered the parquet floors and stood over the builder, Bogdan, while he sanded them. He chose colours that would work with the light coming from the south, special tiles from Mexico and Italy. He drove me around on his motorcycle to ironmongers on the outskirts of Paris trying to find the perfect bath stand, the perfect bathtub.

  I was indifferent to all the choices, but he was like a man obsessed with building a safe house for his family. Every brick had great significance to him.

  ‘I don’t care! They all look alike!’ I said of the three different claw-footed bath tubs in front of me.

  ‘You will care, trust me. This is our home.’

  He gave himself the name Daddy Bird, because he said he felt like a bird making a nest for his family. When he set up the wireless network, he named it DADDYBIRD. He punched in his number on my telephone as DADDY.

  But he drove himself to near exhaustion, and I did not understand his inability to stop, his compulsions. The more he did, the weaker I felt. It was almost as though all the independence I had was being washed out of me as the flat grew more light, more habitable. When it was over, the cupboards were brand new, the floors shiny, the walls perfectly muted and blended colours. We organized our furniture and bought a new bed, a special one, for his bad back.

  We lay on it in the Parisian department store BHV – the store on the river famous for having every light bulb and every nail imaginable – testing it out.

  ‘Life will be sweet in this new home,’ he said, and for a moment, I felt hopeful. He said, ‘Do you like the house I made for you?’

  At home, he lit fires, ordered wood, dragged it up on his back from our cave – wine cellar – in the basement of our building. I asked him, restraining myself from hysteria, to be careful of his back. He seemed not to care: he almost seemed to want to break it again.

  The stubborn man from the mountains, I called him, because he had grown up in the Alps. Once, when I was small, I had a dream: You will marry a man and he will come from the mountains. At the time, it meant nothing to me. But when I saw Bruno for the first time, when I went to the place where his ancestors came from, and where we had married, the place where he grew up, in the remote mountains near Grenoble, the Vercors, I understood him perfectly. The house had been in his family since the 1600s. The land was hilly and full of ancient trees. The rooms were enormous and cold, lit by a huge fireplace in the large room where his relatives had once cooked soup and made bread.

  There was a stone fountain in front of the house that was full of mountain water that woke me on summer mornings with the sound of its softness, and on the wall in the sitting room was a chart with the height of all his ancestors as they grew bigger. The first time that I went to Grisail, the village, his late father Philippe pulled out a pencil and ruler and measured me too.

  ‘Now you are part of our family,’ he said. Luca was there, and Bruno and his two brothers growing. And now I was on the wall for ever too. Because I had no real roots of my own, because my own identity and nationalities were so blurred and baffled, I loved the fact that he was so solidly entrenched in his.

  The new flat was on a street called rue Nôtre Dame des Champs. Our Lady of the Fields. Finished, it was beautiful, perfect. The baby was growing, getting bigger in his new wooden bed with cut-out hearts that we had found in a tiny shop in the Marais: he was now too big for a crib, and tearfully I packed it up and loaded it into our new cave.

  And at first, it seemed like things would be fine. I would cook dinner, wash the dishes, and settle down. Bruno would sit by the fire for hours, poking it, making it bigger and adding to the grate.

  ‘Are you all right?’ I would ask him.

  ‘Go to bed, baby. Everything is fine.’

  I pulled the duvet, white and smooth, over my nose, the way I had when I was a child and frightened that an apparition – the Virgin Mary, in particular – would appear to me. I had read too many stories about Bernadette at Lourdes.

  Magazines and newspapers came to photograph the flat, to write about the life of two war correspondents who settled down and made a home. ‘Why Paris?’ they asked.

  ‘We wanted to feel safe.’

  Why was it, then, that I still did not feel safe?

  ‘Do you think,’ I said to Bruno one night, ‘that this stuff really fucked us up for good?’

  ‘What stuff?’

  ‘All of it. The graves, the fires, the bombs. All of it.’

  He did not say anything for a while. He got another log, put it on top of the other.

  ‘I’m the champion fire-builder,’ he said. ‘And you are the champion nappy-changer.’ He poured more wine.

  ‘Did it hurt us?’

  After a while, he finally answered me. ‘How could it not?’

  He never really got to enjoy the beautiful home he had made for us. Shortly after we moved in, his back – and he – got sick again.

  12

  Breakdown

  When the body breaks down, it does not all go at once, it goes piece by piece. First it was Bruno’s back – twenty years of hauling a camera, sleeping on floors and general abuse. Then it seemed his entire immune system seemed to cave in. Bouts of African malaria came back. Once, in Abidjan, he had a crisis during the coup d’état. It was curfew and no doctor could get to his house. So he lay in bed alone, in his sarong, sweating and freezing, sweating and freezing, with a makeshift drip hooked up to him. He says he does not remember drinking water, or eating, or getting up to go to the bathroom. Someone came and took a photograph of him which I still have somewhere – lying in a bed of sheets soaked with sweat, his fever rising, his head damp and his limbs splayed. I hated that photograph.

  Once, we took a taxi together to a depressing hospital outside of Paris to check him in when he felt another bout of malaria was coming. He asked me to leave him there, to go home, to take care of the baby, because he felt that he had to do it alone. We took pictures of the two of us in a photo booth downstairs in the hospital before the nurses took him away. I am wearing a white wool hat; he is trying to make me laugh because he knows I am worried.

  Then the malaria passes, and he is smoking two packs of Camel non-filters a day. He has to wear a back brace, an ugly metal and leather thing, and he is in constant, excru­ciating pain. Now he is not eating. Now he is really drinking heavily. Sometimes I say something. ‘Do you have to open another bottle? We just had one.’

  He lights cigarettes off the end of each other, a chain of nicotine. ‘Let me handle it myself.’

  If you read books about alcoholics, or see movies, even bad ones, that try to portray drinking, you always see a scene – cinematic almost – where the end comes crashing down. Where something gives way to something bigger. Ours came in the late summer, around the time when Paris Plages, the beach set up by the city council, draws crowds and crowds of people to the edge of the Seine. We had dinner at a Mexican restaurant in the 5th. Bruno had already been drinking, and at dinner he drank several more margaritas, more wine. Then he got on his motorcycle.

  ‘I think maybe you shouldn’t drive,’ I said.

  He handed me my helmet. ‘I’m fine.’

  We drove along the river, the summer air hitting me in the open place that my helmet did not cover. He drove fast. He wove in and out of cars. I wondered what would happen if the bike skidded, if we fell, if my head smashed like a melon. Luca, at home, was innocently asleep, waiting for his parents to come home uninjured.

  ‘Slow down,’ I said.

  ‘I can handle it.’ He sped up. He cut up a kid, a North African teenager from the banlieue, on a dinky scooter. The kid gave him the finger. What happened next happened fast. Bruno drew his moto right next to
the kid’s, dwarfing his tiny scooter. He kicked the kid’s bike, and it veered slightly off the road.

  ‘What the fuck? You could have killed him. And us.’ We were so close to them I could see the fear in the eyes of the kid’s girlfriend, who rode behind him in a miniskirt and high-heeled boots. It was like bumper cars, but real. ‘God, Bruno, don’t do this.’

  But he was at war, like when he played ‘Age of Empires’ all night on his computer with various strange addicted people all over the world, and when I came in to interrupt him, he would shout, ‘This is war, baby!’

  Then a cop was on top of us. A big cop, also North African, moustached, pissed off, aggressive. ‘Get down off your bike.’ Bruno got down. I got down. He let loose a torrent of complaints to the cop who appeared not to hear him. ‘Papers?’ Bruno handed him his papers. ‘Ah,’ the cop said, ‘I see you live in the 1st arrondissement.’

  ‘No, the 6th. We just moved.’

  ‘The 6th, I see.’ Even I could read the expression on his face: rich bastard, thinks he can kick some poor kid from the suburbs. And he lives in the 6th! The cop, after some kind of negotiation, let the North African teenager go.

  Bruno exploded. He shouted back it was unfair, that the kid had cut him up, that he had been driving a moto in Paris for twenty years and knew what he was doing, that the kid was wrong, he was right.

  ‘You’re drunk, just shut up and take a ticket,’ I said. ‘If he breathalyzes you, you’re finished.’